Inhaltsbereich

Reducing Belief to Probability

Zusammenfassung:
Is it possible to give an explicit definition of belief (or
acceptance) in terms of subjective probability, such that believed
propositions are guaranteed to have a sufficiently high probability,
and yet it is neither the case that belief is stripped of any of its usual
logical properties, nor is it the case that believed propositions are
bound to have probability 1? We prove the answer is 'yes', and that
given some plausible logical postulates on belief, there is but one way of
determining the extension of the concept of belief that does the job.
The concept of belief is not to be eliminated from scientific or
philosophical discourse, rather, by reducing belief to assignments of consistently
high probability, belief and probability turn out to be governed by one
unified theory that offers the prospects of a huge range of applications.
Within that theory, logic and probability theory are not opposed to each other
but go hand in hand.